Kevin J. Anderson is best known for around a hundred novels, including the "Seven Suns" series. His short fiction is little known, yet it contains the same diversity of ideas and settings. The 2006 collection, Landscapes, consists of 24 stories; 14 are SciFi, 7 are labeled "fantasy", and three "The Great Outdoors". This review involves the first ten SciFi stories, five of which are set in the Alternitech milieu, in which researchers visit alternate realities to find lost Beatle albums, medical remedies, and other technologies our reality might have missed.
- Music Played on the Strings of Time – This story introduces the Alternitech stories. A musician in a creative rut is searching for "lost" music, and finds some of his own that, in his own reality, he hasn't written. That'll get you out of your funk…won't it?
- Tide Pools – A remedy found too late. How do you come to terms with it? This question is confronted daily, without the need to look "sideways".
- An Innocent Presumption – The prior two stories had their own protagonists. This is the first of two with Heather Rheims. She begins by fingering a mass murderer, but finds out there is more than one way to kill.
- The Bistro of Alternate Realities – Heather has fortuitously met several alternate versions of herself, and found the values—and risks—of collaboration.
- Rough Draft – In another take on the theme of Music Played, a "retired" author is confronted with a book written in an alternate reality. Will this re-start his career, or destroy him?
- Job Qualifications – One of the more unpleasant implications of cloning: using clones of a candidate for global office to gather experience in many fields, which he can then assimilate through some kind of brain probe. He becomes much more qualified for the position. Too bad for the clones.
- Rest in Peace – A what-if story of leadership, and whether a very exaggerated "conservative" or "progressive" approach will work better.
- Carrier – A sad tale of self-sacrifice, with a darkly humorous twist, promulgated by a naive AI system.
- Controlled Experiments – Make a bunch of rats super-intelligent, and you might just find yourself their target, particularly when they find out what the term "lab rat" means.
- TechnoMagic – Clarke's Dictum, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", forms the basis for this amusing story. Would a real, highly advanced alien among us show such self-restraint?
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